HomeBooks & MediaWelcome to The Anticareerist, formerly known as Rethinking the Job Culture

September 13, 2017

Welcome to The Anticareerist, formerly known as Rethinking the Job Culture

Introducing anticareerist.net, the new blogging home for the project previously known as Rethinking the Job Culture! All the blog posts from Radical Unjobbing, my archived blog at wordpress.com, have now been migrated to this new site.

A brief history of this project’s associated names and websites, from its first iteration in 1998:

1998: Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery (CLAWS) at whywork.org (no longer online as an archive, but available through the Wayback Machine at archive.org; has not been under my control since 2004)2010: Radical Unjobbing at radicalunjobbing.wordpress.com2011: Rethinking the Job Culture at radicalunjobbing.wordpress.com (still online as an archive; I will be redirecting visitors here for one year and then deleting the blog.)2017: The Anticareerist at anticareerist.net

I still like the name Rethinking the Job Culture, and it’s still applicable to what I’m doing with this project. It’s somewhat ambiguous, though, and it’s a mouthful to say. The Anticareerist is brief and pithy, and the meaning comes across a little more clearly to people who are unfamiliar with the project. It also has a slightly more playful feel, which I’ve found helpful when engaged in the kind of deep-dive rethinking and culture change I aim for with this project.

I use @unjobbing as my Twitter handle, and I use the neologisms unjobbing and anticareerism more or less interchangeably, so I also considered the name Unjobbing. But when I looked into registering the domain name, I found that all the variations of unjobbing I was interested in were already claimed, and anticareerist was available. So I chose anticareerist, and it quickly grew on me…especially after I took note of the way it came across to folks who are new to my work. I first heard the term anticareerist from basic income writer Kate McFarland, and with her permission I decided to switch the name of the project to The Anticareerist.

I hope this name change helps convey that I do not consider this an ‘anti-work’ or ‘anti-job’ project. It is a project in favor of a world beyond compulsory wage labor and “earning a living.” It is a project to decolonize time and build a culture of leisure that is accessible to all, including women and marginalized people. It is a project that aims to build and nurture a culture in which everyone who wants to work has opportunities to work by choice, doing things that are important or meaningful to them, instead of being driven into jobs they don’t like by the structural coercion of their need to “earn a living.” (See What Is Anticareerism? for more on this.)

For a year I experimented with releasing work mostly on Medium and Patreon; this helped me realize that for a writer doing this kind of work, there’s just no substitute for a proper self-hosted blog. So I’ve taken all the public material I previously posted on Radical Unjobbing, Medium, and Patreon, and collected it here. Everything I’ve made public for this project since 2010 is now searchable in one collection, under my own control. Those who are interested in the first iteration of this project can find my archived work at whywork.org – though do keep in mind that my thinking on these matters has changed a lot in the twenty years I’ve been working on this project!

I don’t intend to stop releasing work on Medium or Patreon; I still appreciate both platforms greatly, and my patrons on Patreon will still be notified first about my newly released work. If you have an account on Patreon (you need not be a creator yourself to have one), you can use the “follow” button to receive, like, and comment on my public posts in your home feed there – even if you are not a patron of mine. I encourage folks to use that follow button, as I aspire to make my work freely available to all who wish to read it without inserting a paywall or subjecting readers to sales pitches. Patreon gives me hope that one day I’ll be able to do this without sacrificing my own financial needs or having to devote the bulk of my time to my day job.

I will soon be releasing a new essay featuring material adapted from the thesis section of On The Leisure Track: Rethinking the Job Culture, my book manuscript in progress. Watch this space for “Earning a Living” and the Dilemma of Unpaid Work: On the Injustice of a World Without Unconditional Basic Income.” And if you enjoy my work, feel free to share it. Thank you!

Enjoy my writing and want to read more of it? You can help make that happen by becoming a patron!

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About The Author

D. JoAnne Swanson

D. JoAnne Swanson, a.k.a. Danica, is a non-fiction writer, blogger, and professional anticareerist. She is resident hermit, amateur nun, and CEO (Creative Endarkenment Overseer) at The Black Stone Hermitage, a contemplative Norse polytheist monastic retreat and house of worship. She has been writing as a conscientious objector to “earning a living" since 1998, when she launched whywork.org.

“I am a conscientious objector to “earning a living.” I firmly believe that requiring people to “earn a living” through wage labor is a violation of the spirit and a form of structural violence, however widely condoned and culturally sanctioned it may be.”

– D. JoAnne Swanson, founder of The Anticareerist

“What if we stopped believing the calculated nonsense that each of us has to work eight or more hours a day simply to survive? Think what we could be and do!”

– Sonia Johnson, “Lilies of the Field”

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